The head of our stats team dives into his favorite gems within this new world of data.

As we prepared for Catchella, I spent a fair amount of time sifting through the data—65 years of it, to be exact. There are many stories and analyses to run, but there are just a bunch of fun things that I noticed while playing in the sandbox.

Brad Ausmus is one of the most durable and valuable receivers on record: 1st in blocking runs, 2nd in framing runs, 11th in throwing runs, 1st in total runs...suddenly on the fringe of the Hall of Fame. Is he more Mark Belanger or Ozzie Smith? Either way, the man managing the Tigers these days hasn’t completely given up the tools of ignorance.

The best and worst receivers of the week(s) and year, with end-of-season minor-league stats.

2013 League Leaders
Welcome back. We’re going to start things off a little differently this time. These are the top five framers of 2013, according to Max Marchi’s model, through the end of August (it takes time to run, so it’s updated monthly). Negative numbers are runs saved, and numbers inside parentheses are called pitches.

We were off last week because of the All-Star break, so this edition will cover the two weeks since last time.

Framing-related link
I did a guest spot on the Blue Jays Plus podcast to talk about J.P. Arencibia's receiving skills. As you'll probably recall from his previous appearances at BP, Arencibia rated very poorly over the past two seasons, and at the beginning of this season. But in mid-June, he worked with Blue Jays roving catching instructor Sal Fasano, and since then he's rated quite well. Small sample, of course, but the statistical improvement seems to be backed up by mechanical improvements. I might write more about this soon, but for now you can hear me talk about it if you're so inclined. The moral of the story is that Sal Fasano is still the best possible person.

Framing-related link
As promised, Max Marchi followed up on his work on Retrosheet-based historical framing by applying the same method to the minor leagues. I was somewhat skeptical that the results would be useful, since there are a few aspects of minor league life that make receiving skills harder to assess: umpires call less consistent zones, pitchers have worse command, and because of the constant promotions and demotions, catchers are less familiar with their batterymates’ arsenals.

But Max found a fairly strong correlation between framing performance in the upper minors and the majors, so we know that by the time a catcher gets to Double-A, at least, his receiving talents are detectable. That’s a significant finding, and it’s possible that we could identify strong receivers statistically in the low minors or even at the amateur level, if we had access to reliable pitch-by-pitch data. If teams aren’t doing this analysis already, they will be before long.